Caption competition – dynamic x-axis titles in Tableau

As is often the case, my #MakeoverMondaysubmission this week was very simple. However, that simplicity represented a 100% implementation of an idea I had in my head, including a little trick to create dynamic, parameter driven x-axis titles.

In terms of insight, I was conscious that there were quite a lot of submissions which tried to show all 500 YouTubers in one view, which is quite an undertaking to pull off. Instead, I chose to focus on the A+ to D Ratings, to see if there was an obvious relationship between those Ratings and the Measures in (or derivable from) the datsaset.

What is a parameter driven axis title? See how the axis title at the foot of the chart changes in the slideshow below, based on the parameter selected:

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Google came up trumps once more, and it was this article which showed me the easy implementation of this “trick”. In my case, the parameter was the standard method of implementing this functionality – the parameter itself and a calculation based on that parameter:

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At this juncture, I became stuck with the x-axis titles and a Google search resulted in the article linked above. The solution is to use something I had vaguely heard of before, but had never paid attention to as it had never had a use case for me. Captions:

When you show a caption, you get this:

More importantly, if you double-click and edit the Caption, look what you can pull into it:

Parameters! Therefore, with a little bit of formatting and fiddling with positioning, I could achieve the desired end product. Whilst in Worksheet mode a Caption has a prominent, shaded Header, that disappears when the Worksheet is part of a Dashboard. Therefore if you remove the Header from your x-axis, a Caption can give the illusion of dynamism in your axis titles.

For the record, here’s how my final Caption looked:

I still consider myself new to Tableau, with less than a years’ experience, so there may be other / better ways to achieve the same result. If anyone reading knows of these alternative methods, please let me know via the Comments section, and I’ll update the post accordingly.

Attacking the y-axis is slightly different, and this old-ish article from Andy Kriebel shows the way to address this. In addition, you can just add a parameter to a worksheet title to make things super clear: